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Leffe has scheduled a game for 7pm tonight, make sure you have the patch downloaded and installed (and the minimap mod reinstalled) in time for then. I hope you've got your new internets up and running TC....

Having run the blockades and arrived in France, I have secured an audience with the Emperor and succeeded in laying a telegraph wire between my new residence and the rest of the world. How does Wednesday sound for an offensive in Maryland?

Note: Still no idea how this runs on my laptop. If the answer is "not", will have to wait until later in September.

Actually, if we fix this crashing/hanging issue, it'd be fun to play a full Gettysburg battle, and write it up as an AAR/Diary/podcast.

I still think broader acceptance of this game is largely due to it being pidgeonholed as a hardcore wargame. Part of it is also the length of battles and the lack of immediacy, but the learning curve is far less steep than, say, Starcraft 2. I'm keen to get more exposure of this on RPS - I think Tim Stone said it was on his todo list for Flare Path?

Antietam is the second expansion pack for Scourge of War – Gettysburg.

Featuring the battles of Antietam and South Mountain, Antietam will include 26 new single player and 2 multi-player historical scenarios. Played on four new meticulously researched and accurate maps, Antietam promises to deliver the ultimate Civil War playing experience for casual and hard core gamers alike.

New beta patch out. It doesn't directly address the courier problem we run into, but it offers a new way to handle textures which promises a smoother experience. Most importantly, however, is we now have a lot more control over our sandbox games. We can now choose how many objectives we want in a game, how valued they are, how long we can control them for (up to the maximum 240mins, so we no longer have to vacate objs) and how many points before the game ends (the max used to be 10k, I gave up when I reached 40k).

I just got this game and have a few questions, I hope you guys might be kind enough to help me out?

I was surprised and (extremely) disappointed to discover that there's no campaign per se. In fact ,there appears to be nothing connecting most of the provided scenarios, and nothing to indicate how altering the outcome of one of the scenarios might impact the overall battle. Even more baffling, what few scenarios do seem to be connected (the carry over battle chains) seem to abruptly switch sides, which makes no sense at all to me. Am I misunderstanding something here, or is this really just a collection of unconnected scenarios that don't connect?

I apologize if this is an incredibly ignorant question, but I'd gotten the impression from a number of sources that there was a lot more strategic context at work here than is apparent.

Yeah, those four hours just flew by. I had the most fun as a corps commander trying to creatively interpret our army commander's (Gobbler's) orders in such a way as to keep my corps as intact as possible.

While Gap's corps was getting battered on their Cemetery Hill line I had my corps pull back to Cemetery Ridge to meet a surprise flank march by at least one Reb division (I definitely saw Rodes, but there may have been a second). Gobbler's cavalry managed to spoil and delay the Reb's attack so that it came in piecemeal with about 2/3 heading for TC's section of the line to the south and the remaining 1/3 menacing Ali to the north. Gobbler insisted we prevent this flank march from heading north and hitting Gap's over extended line in the rear, so I gave the ok for Ali and TC to advance and actively engage their opponents.

After a short while the flank march had been dealt with. By now Gap had withdrawn his entire battered corps to Cemetery Hill and was repulsing all comers. Gobbler had ordered me to redeploy my fresh division (Robinson's AI) to Cemetery Hill to forestall a collapse of Gap's defence, but by the time he arrived there everything was fine, so I ordered him back to the centre of my line (TC's and Ali's divisions being separated by about a mile of open ground).

With Robinson back in position at the centre of my line I decided to order a reverse-Pickett. I gave my orders to TC and Ali to stick to the flanks of Robinson's division and the corps stepped off en mass to cover the ground from Cemetery Hill to Seminary Ridge. We were mostly facing pockets of resistance from Reb infantry that had been broken once already, but the manoeuvre called for the corps to effectively strike out west before pivoting north to roll up the rest of the enemy west of Gettysburg which cost us a lot of time. TC got drawn out to face a much stronger enemy opposing him and he was practically lost from the advance about 15mins in.

Nevertheless, Ali and Robinson (AI) were able to continue the attack north and (with the assistance of Gobler's cavalry) drive off or seize the Reb grand battery that had been shelling Cemetery Hill for the entire battle. With this battle won, Gobbler gave the order for my corps to head for the major objective. Robinson (AI) was still pretty fresh, Ali's division was still intact but had by now seen a lot of fighting and TC was being fought to a standstill off to the south.

I ordered Robinson (AI) to take up position in the woods surrounding the Lutheran Seminary while I did a spot of reconnaissance. As I expected, the enemy had a fresh division sitting on the objective. I discounted any notion of carrying the attack forward and sat back while my artillery came on line. I ordered Ali to position his division behind Robinson and ordered TC to disengage from his attack and march north to Cemetery Hill. I would have liked to have concentrated my corps to the south of the railroad cut with Ali to my left and Robinson the right each putting a brigade forward and keeping a brigade in reserve. Meanwhile, the XI corps would attack from the woods on Oak Hill. Gobbler shot this idea down, however, and insisted that I deploy a division north of the cut to reinforce Gap's shattered corps. I reluctantly ordered Ali to take up this position.
With TC just arriving on Cemetery Hill, we begun the attack with only 2/3 of my corps on the field. I ordered TC from Cemetery Hill to the Seminary, but I was expecting his division to be tired from heavy fighting and the long marching, so it would be my reserve.

Robinson's (AI) division hit the enemy near MacPherson's Ridge, and had a single brigade forward with one in reserve and was battling with Davis's large regiments. After a short while I spotted the enemy redeploying a brigade (Archer's it turned out) to reinforce Davis's right so I ordered TC immediately into action on my left. Meanwhile, Ali sent me a desperate message, his division was disintegrating across the railroad cut to the north. I deployed most of Robinson's reserve brigade over the cut to the north (two of his regiments were already in action near MacPherson's Farm). Eventually, what I expected to happen, happened. Robinson's regiments deployed on MacPherson's ridge started routing from sheer exhaustion. Their morale would flip from high to broken in an instant and soon I had only Robinson's reserve brigade in action, partly south of the cut, mostly north of the cut. Off to the south was TC, now separated from the rest of the corps.

It was enough, though, because elsewhere in the Army Gap's corps had been able to swing round the enemy's position to the north and after much heavy fighting were able to gain the objective.

To be fair to Gobbler, we would have been screwed had Ali not joined us on the right. As it was, Ali held the space between the hill and the gully well enough for Ice to pound the enemy's flank, and Leffe was able to fill a gap opening between our lines with his two remaining regiments. And yes, one of the best games of SoW I've ever played. I do need to get better at persuading the AI commanders to do what I want, though. Almost lost an entire AI division to being cut off at the start.

I think facing a significantly larger enemy helped make things interesting. The enemy did come in waves, rather than hitting us in one go, and a couple of times they pulled back when I thought they were about to break our lines. After a while, as with any game, humans get better than the AI at tactics, so adding more men is an easy way to even the playing field.